use Perl

• You miss the point (Score:1)

  by LaPerla (33) on 2007.12.12 0:06 (#59406) Journal

  Of course the real mechanism to verify signatures is out of band. The command that does it is cpansign -v. The 00-signature.t file simply does the equivalent of cpansign -v to verify that it actually works.

  Just like tests generally just verify that something does what it intends to do.

  Imagine that an author signs his work wrongly. During make disttest he will notice the bug and has a chance to fix the thing before releasing. Just like with any other test.

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Alias (5735)

    In which case never, under any circumstances, should this test EVER run during installation.
    
    It should be a compulsory skip, unless something like AUTOMATED_TESTING of AUTHOR_TESTING is enabled.
    
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by audreyt (6654)

      Correct. It was intended as a convenience measure for "make disttest", that's all.

      The standard boilerplate 0-signature.t (as documented in Module::Signature's POD) has this opening:

      if (!$ENV{TEST_SIGNATURE}) {
          print "ok 1 # skip set the environment variable TEST_SIGNATURE to enable this test\n";
      }

      Which satisfies the compulsory skip requirement via the environment variable TEST_SIGNATURE.
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Alias (5735)

        Do you think it's necessary to have its own TEST_SIGNATURE flag?
        
        If the contexts in which it should be used are clear, perhaps it would be better to flag in on AUTOMATED_TESTING or a context-appropriate flag.